Starcher-Blog

Starcherone Books / Ted Pelton / Contemporary Fiction / Buffalo NY

Monday, August 31, 2009

Contest Press Release (with finalists, honorable mentions, etc.)

Press Release
Contact: Ted Pelton, Director, Starcherone Books, ted@starcherone.com, 716-885-2726


Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Chosen by Ben Marcus for the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction


Alissa Nutting of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction contest (2009-10) for her manuscript, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. She will receive $1,000 and publication during Starcerone’s 2010-11 season.

Nutting was selected from among five finalists by Final Judge Ben Marcus. A total of 210 manuscripts were submitted for the prize.

Alissa Nutting received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor for The Black Warrior Review. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she is the Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.

Nutting’s manuscript was one of five finalists. The titles of these manuscripts were announced in July, while the names were held back to keep the judging blind. The other finalists, listed alphabetically, were:

• Roxanne M. Carter – Glamorous Freak: How I Taught My Dress to Act
• Rich Ives – The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins to Leak
• Grace Krilanovich –The Orange Eats Creeps
• Levi Teal – 200 Pieces

Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a hilarious and terrifically inventive collection of short fiction where each story in the book is predicated upon a would-be career choice for women. The stories are titled, sometimes very fancifully, after these "unclean jobs," such as "Model's Assistant," "Knife-Thrower," "Bandleader's Girlfriend," "Corpse Smoker," and "She-Man." Ten of the stories have been published in literary journals, including Tin-House, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and Swink.

In awarding the prize, Ben Marcus had this to say about Nutting’s book:

“Alissa Nutting builds a dark catalog of behavior for her characters and the result is a kind of human bestiary, if humans were programmed to go down in flames, to run themselves aground, to seek ruin on every occasion. These fine stories, anthropologically thorough in their view of the contemporary person, illuminate how people hide behind their pursuits, concealing what matters most to them while striving, and usually failing, to be loved.”


Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls will be Nutting's debut book. Although it is not a condition of the prize, all six times the Starcherone Prize has been awarded, it has gone to a debut author. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize have gone on to win even more critical accolades for their work; most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the 2008 New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age or younger.

The other previous winners of the Starcherone Prize have been Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, and Janet Mitchell. Mitchell's book, The Creepy Girl and Other Stories, is newly available from Starcherone Books.

There were also 5 manuscripts designated as honorable mentions in the 2009-10 contest:

• Rebbecca Brown – They Become Her
• Misha Hoekstra – The Joy of Edge Tools
• Mary Overton – The Gossip's Crime
• Brian Seabolt – The Alpha Privative
• Ron Tanner – Kiss Me, Stranger

The blind-judged contest drew a total of 210 entries in 2009. The 7th Starcherone Prize contest (2010-11) will begin accepting entries in October 2009, with a final deadline in February 2010. The judge of next year’s contest will be novelist Stacey Levine.

Friday, August 07, 2009

Winner!!!


Alissa Nutting of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction contest (2009-10) for her manuscript, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Nutting was selected from among five finalists by Final Judge Ben Marcus.

Alissa Nutting received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor for the Black Warrior Review. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she is the Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a hilarious and terrifically inventive collection of short fiction where each story in the book is predicated upon a would-be career choice for women. The stories are titled, sometimes very fancifully, after these "unclean jobs," such as "Model's Assistant," "Knife-Thrower," "Bandleader's Girlfriend," "Corpse Smoker," and "She-Man." Ten of the stories hagve been published in literary journals, including Tin-House, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and Swink.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls will be Nutting's debut book. Although it is not a condition of the prize, all six times the Starcherone Prize has been awarded, it has gone to a debut author. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize have gone on to win even more critical accolades for their work: most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age. The other previous winners of the Starcherone Prize have been Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, and Janet Mitchell.

The blind-judged contest drew a total of 209 entries in 2009. The 7th Starcherone Prize contest (2010-11) will begin accepting entries in October 2009, with a final deadline in February 2010.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Starcherone Prize Finalists Announcement



These are the titles of the five manuscripts that are finalists for the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction:

> 200 Pieces
> The Balloon Comtaining the Water Containing the Narrative is Leaking
> Glamorous Freak: How I Taught My Dress to Act
> The Orange Eats Creeps
> Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

These manuscripts, with the authors' names remaining undisclosed, have been forwarded to Final Judge Ben Marcus, who will select one winner of the Starcherone Prize for 2009. The winner will receive a $1,000 prize and be published in our 2010-11 season.

The Final Judge has the option of selecting additional manuscripts from which to make a selection.

This year's contest began with 210 entries, and our decisions to date have been extremely difficult, owing to the high quality of the submissions. Many terrific books had to be eliminated from contention, simply due to the limitations of the contest and what we are able to accomplish as a small press. In order to help promote some of these worthy manuscripts, a number of other entries will be designated with Honorable Mentions. These will be announced when our final decisions are announced, in early August. Please check this blog for an announcement in late July or after.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

An Interview with Ted Pelton


This "interview" mash-up was constructed by Brian Lampkin.

Ted Pelton is the author of the novel Malcolm and Jack and other Famous American Criminals and the collection of short stories Endorsed by Jack Chapeau 2 an even greater extent. He is also the founder and executive director of Starcherone Books—a publisher of innovative fiction. Ted was also a classmate of mine at the University of Buffalo and co-conspirator in several literary and community experiments and projects. He is currently at work on a collection of Woodchuck Stories. Let’s call them parables.

The danger in all interviews for the interviewee is that all control is lost in the editing process. A writer can be taken completely out of context or elided to the point of incomprehension. This interview foregounds those concerns and is compiled from twenty-five years of conversations, letters, blogs, articles and e-mails.


Brian: Hi, Ted, do you have time to talk?
Ted: Oh, we are all such busy people! Who has time? But friends, let us not forget what brought us here. No need to write essays every time out of the box. But we should continue to talk about why we think innovative/avantgarde/experimental/heterodox fiction is what we all have said it is: a potential antidote to the stupidity of American hegemony in 2007! [ed: I’m sure he knows the year; perhaps he refers to the pre-Obama era.] to the mindlessness of a society that knows of many ways that it's going in the wrong direction but seems powerless to stop itself!! to the simplistic selves we're told we are by advertisers politicians law enforcement officers and many many others!!! an art form at a time when books are commodities and Bertelsmann Murdoch Time Warner etc. has nearly secured its victory over us and we're at the point of near-irrelevance!!!! -- It's important to keep talking. We are not against tradition. We are a version of the tradition that's being edited out.


Brian: Right on. So how does an independent publisher and experimental writer promote his work?
Ted: A funny thing happened to me this week. I was promoting my novel Malcolm & Jack during the month… (and so the smartest among you are now saying, oh, I see, this isn't a legitimate [interview] [ed: to say the least], this is just part of his marketing strategy ... but I'll just leave that thread alone ...), and have it linked on amazon.com with Jack Kerouac's new "Original Scroll" version of On the Road …. This has made my sales rise ever so slightly (and not nearly enough to pay for the cost of the promotion).

Anyway, my novel is called Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) and is centered around a conjectured meeting between Malcolm X and Jack Kerouac. It's a novel about history, underground characters during the beginnings of American empire, improvisational poetics & politics, etc.

Brian: Okay, we’ll talk specifically about your novel. I was going to get there, but now’s fine. I love its mix of imaginative re-creation with the hard science of research. Is there any conflict in your mind about altering and even misrepresenting history?
Ted: Endings are the toughest thing to do, as a writer, no doubt….

Brian: I’m sure that’s true, but can you answer the question?
Ted: I am interested in and sensitive to questions concerning the ethics of representation…questions…may well be raised about my own novel, Malcolm & Jack, particularly where I fashion artificial constructions of the subject positions of such figures as Malcolm X and Billie Holiday. In answering these concerns myself, I would underline the sense that narratives are always constructions, and any verisimilitude created by fiction is an effect of the art form, in no way a speaking for the absent subject: verisimilitude is not verity. At the same time, what fiction writers DO is represent. That is the essential form of the art: it is an art of lying, invention, artificial construction, mimicry, semblance. I think it is a limitation on the practice of the art to say that there is some aspect of discourse, experience, or history that one should refrain from representing, as a hard and fast rule. Of course, one should not go into the minefields of representation unadvised or without respect for the significances of histories of racism, oppression, violence and the like. We should also expect the representations of others from assumed and masqueraded subject positions will be problematic--that is the nature of experimental art. Fiction, by its very nature, is a practice which self-consciously presents itself as lies, thus leads us to reflect upon lying, both within deliberately designed aesthetic creations and upon the at-large practices of fictionalization at work in all walks of our lives. Fiction is that discourse that calls into question the truth-telling strategies of language even as it employs them. Airtight, airbrushed, sanitized lies are the ones we really have to worry about. I am a fiction writer, and so I lie, but my lies haven't been killing people. This distinguishes Kent Johnson and I and y’all (who’s out there?) from Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney, who lie and kill people, or who lie and make people killers. Fiction is lies that do not lie about lying. That distinguishes the art of lies that is fiction from the lies of power we are so much in the grip of in our national discourse today. We are distrusted and feared by the world and we have alienated our own youth so much that a majority have opted out of democratic agency even as we claim to be bringing this great gift to the rest of the world.

Brian: You know, I don’t really think of Malcolm and Jack as an explicitly political novel, but to hear you talk…
Ted: Reading is becoming more and more explicitly a political act, and promoting reading certainly is. When I was writing this book, many people said to me, “Ooh, you’re going to get into trouble for writing as Malcolm X. People are really going to be angry with you.”

Brian: Oh, sorry, that was me. We’ve talked in the past about issues of beauty and ugliness. How has the impulse to make something beautiful informed your work?
Ted: How this impulse informed Malcolm & Jack? I wanted it to be a good book, so I kept trying to make it more beautiful in fulfilling the tasks it had created for itself. Billie Holiday not being able to sing because she’s in jail for drugs she takes because she’s miserable about her life and, goddamn it, oppressed in white America, allowed to appear on a marquee at a hotel club but having to enter the hotel through the back door, and then finding herself in an interracial affair in the segregated jail ... I wanted to create such complex situations out of little-appreciated histories in a way that fit my sense of the complexities of lived experiences–beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That’s all I know, as the poet sez, and I’m sorry some find that a maudlin or politically unsophisticated construction. I want to move thoughtful and sophisticated readers; part of that is political, certainly, but, as Williams says, bad writing never helped anyone. Beauty is what makes a political art successful or not. What is beauty? You tell me.

Brian: Hey, I’m interviewing you, remember? Which reminds me, is marijuana still part of your writing practice?
Ted: Anyway, there was another aspect to your question, about remaking the past. I think this was basically just a side-product of writing about my heroes, Malcolm X, Jack Kerouac, Billie Holiday, and, sure, Alfred Kinsey. And it was also certainly prompted by political resentments against a generation of politicians who have now pretty much passed from the scene, though not entirely–and certainly their assumptions haven’t. I was interested in taking on the 1940s, the period of the development of American Empire. I mean, yes, we fought a war that saved the world from fascism, not rhetorical but real fascism, and that was wonderful and necessary, but what has followed from that, the national valuing of war, has been disastrous, and keeps repeating.

I started the book following on the heels of the Reagan-Bush years; Reagan and Bush were both of that war generation. Malcolm and Jack were both part of an underground in the 1940s that became the different parts of the powerful counter-culture discourse of the 1960s. I wanted to meditate on the 1940s mythmaking that fueled the rise of conservatism in the late 20th century and trumped 1960s pacifist and socialist impulses. Remaking the past is something everybody does. It is the job of fiction writers, I think, to clarify this. Reagan isn’t in the book, but he so clearly exemplified this: I mean, in his stories, as was well documented (see Gary Wills’s book on him, for instance), he believed he actually fought in the war, even though he had worn the uniforms only in war films, and believed as well he was actually present at the liberation of the death camps, so powerful and convincing had his narrative reconstructions about these events been.

So in Malcolm & Jack we’ve got American Empire, hegemonic national narratives, historical crimes (as Malcolm never stopped telling us), and a bunch of sexy people at the heart of it–why shouldn’t I enjoy the activity of remaking the past? Susan Sontag says somewhere that the past is the greatest, most tantalizing imaginative space we have. It’s supposed to be stable. Of course, it isn’t at all; it’s all stories, being remixed and recreated all the time.

Brian: Lovely, Ted, really lovely and astute, I think. Hey, I remember you saying something about your opposition to the New York Times Best Novels of the Post-War era. It’s no good complaining if you can’t come up with alternatives.
Ted: Here's my top list:
Toni Morrison - Beloved
Ben Marcus – Notable American Women
Jane Smiley – A Thousand Acres
Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping
David Markson – Reader’s Block and/or This is Not a Novel
Joe Wenderoth – Letters to Wendy’s
Walter Abish – How German Is It
Stacey Levine – Frances Johnson
Charles Johnson – Oxherding Tale
Jeffrey DeShell – Peter (seriously; but then I'm the publisher, so maybe this is a cynical manipulation)
Denis Johnson – Jesus’s Son
Harold Jaffe – 15 Serial Killers
Thomas Pynchon – Vineland

Honorable Mentions:
David F. Wallace – Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Matthew Derby – Super Flat Times
Raymond Federman – To Whom it May Concern
Brian Evenson – Altmann’s Tongue
Kevin Killian – Little Men
Elizabeth Sheffield – Gone
George Saunders – CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and/or Pastoralia
Nina Shope – Hangings (sorry, compromised again)
Kenneth Bernard – From the District File
Robert Gluck – Margery Kempe
Carole Maso – Ava
Thersesa Hak Jyung Cha – Dictee
Thaddeus Rutkowski – Tetched
Sandra Cisneros – Woman Hollering Creek

Brian: It’s not my place to argue, but what about Malcolm and Jack?
Ted: I want to read more so I can do better. I know I'm forgetting some. But not nearly what the TIMES has forgotten. I couldn't believe that list was for real.

Brian: Well, thanks for your time, Ted. Anything else about Malcolm and Jack you want to get off your chest?
Ted: Sorry, I realize I’m getting off on a political tangent – but it remains a political story for me. I am a pacifist, and it feels like this position has lost years of progress. Now, even Obama feels it’s OK to launch missile strikes into countries we are not at war with, and kill people we feel are guilty of crimes without charging them or having to produce evidence. And that leaves out the children and neighbors of the bad people, who also die, because missiles are a little less precise than lethal injection. It’s a crime to be in certain neighborhoods, evidently, and the crime is punishable by mass, summary executions, which are sometimes administered mistakenly. Oops!

I am angry about similar things in Malcolm & Jack, which examines the 1940s and the roots of American Empire by looking at drop-outs from it. The arrogance of how we have come to look at the world; more specifically, how our narratives have come to be powerful, persuasive, and deadly.

Brian: Goodbye, Ted, it’s always good to check-in with an old friend. I remember when we first met in French class, what, twenty-five years ago….
Ted: Fuck, it's Friday afternoon & I'm home from work & no one has been writing… this concludes the project of reconstruction of a small island of happiness now long lost.

Monday, March 02, 2009

Shoes

After the explosion occurred, the shoes dropped from the sky. Some of them took up to a year to drop.

I am speaking, of course, of Joshua Cohen's novel, A Heaven of Others. All the great news in recent weeks about Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey obscured for the moment another terrific book we published this year by an under-35 author, Cohen. Then dropped two more shoes:


1. A powerful long article on A Heaven of Others in The New Haven Review:

(excerpt) "It is poignant and profound to refract one’s religious doubt this way through a religious mirror, brave to structure an epic novella around religious terrorism in which belief interrogates itself, through its own manifestations, which is something like God seeing himself in the passing surface he has created. Cohen engages his own religion in the terms of that religion, in its own language, which he recreates using myths—like wind-up Schulzian toys—cast in Semitic-syncretic mold, bursting with contradiction. Foreshadowed by writers like Kafka and Bruno Schulz, and poets like Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, these myths are fashioned by Cohen out of the baffling vulgarity of modern life in order to make that life personal again and thus open to interpretation: bombs become seeded fruit and foliage a landscape of exploded nails; a pogrom joke in which a fictional shtetl dresses its animals in human clothes and returns to find it repopulated is turned into an allegory for the state of Israel, with Ray-Ban sunglasses. Though we may be far from home, tragedy is never far from humor. Like Beckett, after whose beat much of the rhythm is marching, Cohen manages to be serious and wry at the same time, ironic and sincere: “Remember that the dead cannot sacrifice. Never again! And, too, that it is not for the living to judge the sacrifices they are bound to make […]” Never again is the slogan of Holocaust remembrance, the refrain of Yom Hazikaron, or the official Israeli Day of Remembrance, on which the last page records this book to have been finished."


2. Mentioned on The Believer short list reader survey of Best Books of 2008, at #14. Behind Morrison, ahead of Millhauser, and in between 2 Bolanos. [scroll down for the whole list]


For more about Joshua Cohen's A Heaven of Others, released one year ago this past month, see Starcherone or Amazon

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Young Lions Fiction Award

Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey has been chosen as a finalist in the New York Public Library's ninth annual Young Lions Fiction Award.

The award honors the works of authors age 35 and under who are making an indelible impression on the world of literature. The winning writer will be awarded a $10,000 prize on March 16, 2009 at a ceremony hosted by Young Lions co-founder and actor Ethan Hawke, held in the Celeste Bartos Forum of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

The award is given annually to an American writer age 35 or younger for either a novel or collection of short stories. Each year five young fiction writers are selected as finalists by a reading committee of Young Lions members, writers, editors, and librarians. A panel of award judges, including novelist Lore Segal, and last year's winner Ron Currie, Jr. (who won for God Is Dead), will select the winner of the $10,000 prize.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

AWP hype

If you're going to AWP in Chicago this year, stop by the Starcherone table (#544, Northwest Hall, Lower Level) on the following days and times to meet some of our authors:

Thursday Feb 12, 1-2 pm - Johannes Göransson, Dear Ra

Friday Feb 13, 1-2 pm - Donald Breckenridge, YOU ARE HERE

Saturday Feb 14, 1-2 pm - Sara Greenslit, The Blue of Her Body